Chapter 20 #4
The shower in the en suite was still running.
Renzo’s muffled laughter and Octavia’s indistinct reply filtered through the closed door—warm, bright, carrying the easy, getting-to-know-you energy of two people discovering each other in the intimate, steam-softened privacy of shared water and shared vulnerability.
Upstairs, the second shower ran—Luka, occupying Kael’s bathroom with the deliberate, territorial provocation of a man who understood that using another Alpha’s personal space was a statement even when framed as a convenience.
And outside, somewhere in the frost-bitten Vermont predawn, Kael S?rensen was walking away from the house that contained everything he wanted, and everything he was afraid of, and the distance between the two had been shrinking all night.
Three Alphas and an Omega. A pack assembled in four minutes of bureaucratic crisis. A registration deadline in less than a week. A competition season that is starting in days.
And a captain who’s been running from two different intimacies—one he had five years ago with the Omega and one he apparently had with the goaltender—and whose strategy for managing both is the emotional equivalent of hiding in his room and complaining about the noise.
This is going to be a disaster.
Or it’s going to be the most interesting thing that’s happened to this pack since the day Kael decided we were going to the Olympics and made the rest of us believe it by sheer force of personality and strategic brilliance.
I walked to the kitchen.
The house was Kael’s off-campus rental—a three-bedroom, two-bath Vermont craftsman that he’d secured through the athletics department and furnished with the sparse, functional minimalism of a man who viewed domestic spaces as operational bases rather than homes.
The kitchen was clean. Organized. Every surface wiped, every utensil in its designated position, the refrigerator stocked with the precise, macro-calculated provisions of a professional athlete’s nutrition program.
I assembled the platter.
Sliced fruit. Protein. Crackers. The remaining bruschetta from the earlier tray.
A fan of avocado slices because Renzo had mentioned, during one of his earlier supply runs, that Octavia had eaten three entire avocados during the first rest phase and had declared them the only food worth living for—a statement she’d delivered with the sincere, heat-loosened conviction of a woman whose taste buds were operating at amplified capacity and who had just discovered religion in a perfectly ripe Hass.
I plated. Poured water. Set the tray on the counter and leaned my palms against the edge, looking out the kitchen window at the dark Vermont landscape—the bare maple branches silhouetted against a sky that was just beginning to soften from black to the deep, pre-dawn navy that preceded sunrise by approximately forty-five minutes.
Octavia’s heat will taper down within the day if we’ve been managing it correctly.
When it does—when the biology releases its grip on her cognition and the woman behind the Omega reassembles herself with the sharp, strategic, taking-no-prisoners clarity that I witnessed at the audition—we’re going to have to confront the elephant in the room.
The pack registration. The fact that none of this is real—not officially, not on paper, not in the way the IOF and Olympia Academy require.
We’re four Alphas and an Omega who stumbled into proximity through a combination of Kael’s strategic impulse, Luka’s bureaucratic improvisation, and the specific, inexplicable scent chemistry that connects all five of us in a way that biology seems to have decided without consulting any of our conscious minds.
The training schedule. Classes start in days. Her coaching assignment. The physical demands of performing at an Olympic qualifying level while navigating a pack dynamic that hasn’t been tested by anything more challenging than sex and a ventilation-system comedy of errors.
And Kael. The central node. The captain who assembled this formation and can’t bring himself to occupy his position in it.
Who sent me to claim her, who chose the room above hers, who walked into the aftermath and asked why she didn’t want him as if the answer weren’t obvious to every person in the building except the one asking.
He’s going to have to face it. All of it. The Omega, the goaltender, the pack, the rut blockers, the ex who taught him that vulnerability was a trap and who left him so gun-shy about intimacy that he’d rather marinate in his own frustration than accept the thing being offered.
And I’m going to have to be the one who navigates us through it.
Because that’s what the enforcer does. Not the flashy saves.
Not the highlight hits. The positioning.
The reads. The ability to see the play developing three moves ahead and place yourself where you need to be so that when the chaos arrives, there’s at least one person in the formation who knows the plan.
I couldn’t help but smirk.
The expression was small. Private. The quiet, contained amusement of a man who had spent the most eventful twenty-four hours of his life discovering that the woman who’d scored three perfect tens on a frozen stage could also dismantle an Alpha’s entire identity in bed, that the pack he’d assumed was stable was actually sitting on a fault line the size of Stockholm, and that his captain’s heart was a locked room whose key was being carried by two different people who didn’t know the other one had a copy.
Getting to know Octavia.
Learning what makes her tick—not the heat version, not the competition version, but the real version.
Getting to learn all of that while we attend Olympia Academy together.
While we train. While we attempt to convince a federation panel that the pack assembled in four minutes of desperate improvisation is legitimate enough to qualify an Omega for the Winter Olympic Games.
The next few weeks are going to be a grand mystery.
I picked up the platter. Walked back toward the hallway.
Heard Octavia’s laughter filtering from the bathroom—bright, genuine, the sound of a woman who was discovering that one of her new Alphas made her laugh, which was, in the hierarchy of intimate accomplishments, significantly higher than most people realized.
And I love solving a good set of riddles when it comes to my pack mates.